Academia should not be driven by social engineering, but nor should the link between teaching and research be lost (Photo: Alamy).

There’s a golden moment in The Thick of It when the minister for paperclips reveals his deep dislike of the average voter. “I know this is what they think people like me think,” he says, “so I hate thinking it, but I just find myself thinking that they're from a different [darn] species.” You have to admire that kind of honesty, even if you are the target of it.

Something vaguely similar happened this week when Sir Roderick Floud said that Britain has “too many universities” and that half of them should close. He’s the former head of Universities UK and the remarks smack of something people think people like Sir Roderick think, but you never quite expect him to say it in public. He explained that in many cities there are two or more places of higher learning competing with each other, “trying to do too many different things, and that the way we fund their research is fundamentally flawed.” He also said that Oxford and Cambridge should stop taking undergraduates and focus on research. Middle England would literally riot.

Sir Roderick is right about a lot of things. There is an excess of top level management (“Why does Leeds or Sheffield or Oxford,” he asked, “need two vice-chancellors, registrars or groups of governors?”) and in their desire to justify their existence, some places of higher learning have become ridiculously multi-faceted – offering everything from the curation of historical monuments to bus services for students. Part of the cause of this was the last Labour government’s desire to get 50 per cent of the population in university, which refocused institutional energy away from academic research and towards the provision of teaching, housing and catering for thousands of new students. Throw in new requirements to show “value for money” and you wound up with a bifurcated system in which management sat in luxury at the top of the pyramid while ordinary staff languished at the bottom – told to teach and write more (an impossible combination) while seeing their pay largely frozen. I know that there’s a stereotype of academics as wealthy drifters who read books by day and eat swan at night, but it’s entirely fictitious. Pay is poor and doesn’t get better, unless – of course – you switch to management. Many academics refuse to do that because they love research so much, which condemns them to a life of worthy poverty if they happen to live in over-priced London.

The system desperately needs reform lest recruitment for future lecturers of quality dries up entirely (proof of this is, as Sir Roderick notes, the shocking number of seminars hosted by graduate students with little training at all in teaching). But Sir Roderick’s advice is flawed in two regards.

First, please don’t shut and/or merge colleges. It’s logical in principle but in practice we all know that “mergers” is a synonym for “lay-offs”. Mass redundancies would not only have a human cost but could also help Britain lose a great deal of vital research that doesn’t happen to fall within the interests of whatever giant institution emerged from the merger. It should be more than possible to reform how work is down within each institution, ensuring that they retain their unique character. From my own field, history, it would be a tragedy to see us lose Oxford Brookes’ history of welfare specialism, Warwick’s centre for the student of the Renaissance, or Viking studies at University College London. Academia should always resist the rationalisation process because much of it simply wouldn’t survive.

Likewise, the idea of certain universities ending undergraduate recruitment would be a folly. I believe that universities do in fact exist primarily for research – to add to the sum of human knowledge. They do not exist to guarantee everyone a degree as part of a state-directed campaign of making society fairer. Social engineering is a perversion of the principle of intellectual inquiry for its own sake.

But the presence of undergraduates should not be seen as a distraction from research but rather as something that enhances it. In both arts and sciences, students often contribute to the work of academics through conversation that sparks ideas, or by simply helping out with fieldwork, reading or collating information. I’ve used undergraduates for all of these things and tutoring undeniably improved my own output dramatically. Divorce academics from undergraduate teaching and their work risks becoming insular and sterile. Teaching shouldn’t overburden the enthusiastic researcher, for sure, but it can also become a way of testing and fleshing out their ideas. A great number of classics of historical studies are essentially course notes compiled into one volume.

Few would deny that the higher education system needs reform. Its problem is that it enjoyed a period of extraordinary wealth and expansion in the Nineties and early Noughties, leaving it bloated and poorly organised. When the crash came, it was suddenly forced to justify its largesse and rethink its entire reason for being – causing a crisis of confidence and veritable brain drain to the private sector. But mergers, cuts and aloofness from teaching are far from the answer. Keep the talents found in each individual college and keep the link between research and study. Just reduce the management and lose the social engineering.